The dude who always keeps silent

Raised in Soviet-era atheism, Russia’s older generation likes to believe that God and scientific knowledge are incompatible. Younger scientists on the other hand, without having experienced the heavy burden of Soviet propaganda, are rather open to listening to God’s opinion.

Being a journalist,
especially one covering science, is very stressful, especially for a woman. Whatever
the color of your hair, when you’re talking about the Big Bang or genetic
engineering with some professor, you’re always regarded as a dumb blonde.
That’s just how it works.

Over in the United
States, for example, journalists are regarded as great intermediaries between
society and science. What they write determines whether or not a scientist will
be awarded a grant. Over here, in Russia, a journalist is the proverbial fifth
wheel. I am little more than an insurance agent, offering a ticket to eternity
to those who want to live only in the present. But this is exactly what gives
me the vantage point of an outside observer, capable of drawing my own
conclusions. Research the researchers. Study the scientists.

For example, over
the past two or three years I have been running a personal opinion poll entitled
Is there a place for God in the mind of a
contemporary scientist? My polling methodology has been hardly original. I kept
asking the same question to all Russian scientists with whom I had a chance to
talk: Do you believe in God? The answers have been strictly age-related. Renowned
scientists in their 60s answered a definitive “No.” Younger people up to 35 –
40 years old were just as confident in answering “Yes.” Those between 40 and 50
years of age were split down the middle. There was no correlation to the field whatsoever.
I observed the same trends across the range of specialists in science, liberal
arts and technology.

Whatever field you examine,
older scientists flatly refuse to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being,
whereas their younger colleagues are true believers. What exactly they believe
in is a totally different matter. I have talked to staunch Orthodox Christian
geneticists, Catholic engineers and Buddhist physicists. While many admitted
they personally were not avid church-goers, nobody doubted the existence of a supreme
source of intelligence and love.

Academic Vitaly
Ginzburg was traditionally considered to be the chief promoter of scientific
atheism among the older generation of Russians. “Belief in God is incompatible
with scientific thinking,” the older generation’s key slogan went, fiercely promoted
by Ginzburg. Meanwhile, the members of the younger generations I polled were
invariably perplexed at my question about whether belief in God is at odds with
rational thinking. “How can they ever contradict each other?” they asked me on
occasion.

The world is so
perfect and beautiful that there’s no way God wasn’t involved, a 26-year-old
biochemist once told me. What else could explain all this beauty and perfection?
Even if it was just a random set of coincidences and things falling together,
the Earth’s creation is still a divine occurrence.

Albert Einstein
famously said: “God does not play dice.” At the time, calculations clearly showed
that randomness lies at the base of the micro world. Einstein spent years to
prove the opposite, while Niels Bohr wisely advised scientists to stop telling
God what to do with his dice.

After ridding
itself of the Jules Verne-style positivism of the 19th century and the revolutionary
romanticism of the 20th, science came to a halt at the threshold of a swirling
existential mystery. Every new piece of knowledge acquired by scientists today
not so much changes our idea of the world around us as reveals the imperfection
of the questions we ask. A young physicist explained to me once the key mystery
of scientists’ dialogue with God.

As a matter of
fact, between the Big Bang and now, the universe had a lot of chances to make
sure life never happened. As it developed, the world was constantly finding
itself at a fork in the road, where the choice of a further scenario was totally
unpredictable.

But each time, a
choice was made from a myriad of options in favor of one that made life and
intelligence possible. Why? God’s and science’s areas of responsibility have
split exactly along the lines of the quality of questions being asked.
Scientists want to know how the world works, but only God knows why it works
the way it does. I’m not sure who said the wonderful phrase, “God is the dude
who always keeps silent,” but young scientists can’t help feeling the presence
of this silent figure. They know the answer is out there. All they need to do
is find it.